So how did The Culling 2 die so quickly in the first place? Well, it seems to be a variety of issues. For starters, the original The Culling only went into full-release late last year and many players seemed to feel spurned that Xaviant would abandon the game so quickly in favor of a sequel less than a year later. Many others complained that this sequel also didn’t feel reminiscent of the game that preceded it and instead opted to adapt to become more similar to battle royale giants like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

Additionally, Xaviant opted to charge $19.99 for The Culling 2 upon its release last week, which isn’t a terrible price point until you consider that the juggernaut that is Fortnite is absolutely free. Growing your playerbase when it comes to battle royale games is always going to be a struggle if you charge for the product simply because of Fortnite’s dominance in the space as a free-to-play game.

These two factors in combination with the game supposedly just controlling and playing horribly along with a variety of bugs and issues quickly sunk The Culling 2. Around 48 hours after launch, The Culling 2’s player count consistently was coming around 25 players on Steam with its all-time peak ever only reaching 249 players.

After all of these issues transpiring, Xaviant released a dire statement via their Twitter account. “It’s time for us here at Xaviant to come together for some much needed soul searching and to have some admittedly difficult discussions about the future of our studio,” said the tweet. The message went on to close by saying, “We’ll talk soon.” As of now, Xaviant has still not provided an update on what their next steps are moving forward.

We’ll keep an eye on this situation as it continues to develop. The battle royale market has become a violent, contentious space over the past year. Hopefully, it hasn’t taken a victim in Xaviant Games.

Logan Moore is a Staff Writer at DualShockers located out of Indianapolis. He is also an audio and video production student at IUPUI who spends his free time podcasting at Model Citizens Media or micro-managing his fantasy baseball team.